The Highest Jump

"First, let's get something straight: Javier Sotomayor's entire career is tainted by drugs. And most people in the know have collectively agreed that the real world record is closer to seven foot ten and a half... . I was a big supporter of his at one time, and I competed against him when he was a kid. I supported him even when he was bounced for using cocaine. But given the evidence now, I am so ashamed of him. Most people won't say it. I will."

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That is Dwight Stones, the great American high jumper, the first man to set a world record using the Fosbury flop, and the man who will be covering all field events for NBC in London. He's talking about legendary Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor's current world record of eight feet, making him the only human ever to convey his entire body over a point in space eight feet — or 2.45 meters — off the ground, using nothing but his legs.

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"People who know what they're talking about pretty much agree that anyone who has jumped higher than 2.40 was probably enhanced. I care deeply about this sport, and so I just have to tell the truth," Stones says.

He's been jumping since he was a kid, and himself cleared 2.34 meters, or seven feet eight inches. That was twenty-eight years ago. The current world champion and London medal favorite, American Jesse Williams, won his gold at the World Championships last year in South Korea with a jump of 2.35 meters, a difference of basically nothing. The winner of the gold in London will do well to clear either height.

Which is all to say that unless we start welcoming drugs or allowing machines to compete, we are approaching the limits of human physiology. In a sport that saw new records steadily for a century — and in which a great high school track meet today in any state will see kids routinely breaking the world record from 1950 — we can't really go any higher. We are tethered to the earth, and we've done all we can. Of course, a new shoe might come along and show us a new way to jump, or another Dick Fosbury — who in 1968 decided to hurl himself over the bar headfirst, and in so doing created a new sport — might show up. But probably not. No, definitely not. It's not going to happen. There are only so many ways for a man to jump through the air.

And so, there are the highest jumpers in the world, running in their great loping strides, leaping in the most graceful arcs over an abstract point in space, landing backward and on their heads, all fighting over millimeters, for the rest of time.